The original press release from the Met Office that started this story is here. There’s no mention of a carbon footprint in it, but they did manage to provide a photo of it with a green halo, shown below. When such a machine is powered up, does it make a “giant sucking sound’? In other news, Obama inauguration sets new record for private jet use. – Anthony
Met Office forecasts a supercomputer embarrassment
A new £33m machine purchased to calculate how climate change will affect Britain, has a giant carbon footprint of its own
For the Met Office the forecast is considerable embarrassment. It has spent £33m on a new supercomputer to calculate how climate change will affect Britain – only to find the new machine has a giant carbon footprint of its own.
“The new supercomputer, which will become operational later this year, will emit 14,400 tonnes of CO2 a year,” said Dave Britton, the Met Office’s chief press officer. This is equivalent to the CO2 emitted by 2,400 homes – generating an average of six tonnes each a year.
The Met Office recently published some of its most drastic predictions for future climate change. It warned: “If no action is taken to curb global warming temperatures are likely to rise by 5.5ºC and could rise as much as 7ºC above pre-industrial levels by 2100. Early and rapid reductions in CO2 emissions are required to avoid significant impacts of climate change.”
However, when it came to buying a new supercomputer, the Met Office decided not to heed its own warnings. The ironic problem was that it needed the extra computing power to improve the accuracy of its own climate predictions as well as its short-term weather forecasting. The machine will also improve its ability to predict extreme events such as fierce localised storms, cloudbursts and so on.
Alan Dickinson, Met Office Director of Science and Technology, said: “We recognise that running such massive computers consumes huge amounts of power and that our actions in weather and climate prediction, like all our actions, have an impact on the environment. We will be taking actions to minimise this impact.”
Dickinson believes, however, that the new computer will actually help Britain cut carbon emissions on a far greater scale than those it emits. He said: “Our next supercomputer will bring an acceleration in action on climate change through climate mitigation and adaptation measures as a consequence of a clearer understanding of risk. Ultimately this will lead to a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions.”
Machines like the Met Office’s new computer are important tools in the battle to slow climate change. They are the only way to assess the potential impact of rising CO2 levels over the coming years and decades.
This is because producing even a short-range weather forecast requires billions of calculations, something that would take weeks to do by hand. Computers enable forecasts to be generated in time to be useful.
Dickinson said: “Our existing supercomputer and its associated hardware produce 10,000 tonnes of CO2 each year, but this is a fraction of the CO2 emissions we save through our work. We estimate that for the European aviation industry alone our forecasts save emissions close to 3m tonnes by improving efficiency.
“Our next supercomputer will bring an acceleration in action on climate change through climate mitigation and adaptation measures as a consequence of a clearer understanding of risk. Ultimately this will lead to a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions.”
When it is finally completed, around 2011 the Met Office machine will be the second most powerful machine in Britain with a total peak performance approaching 1 PetaFlop — equivalent to over 100,000 PCs and over 30 times more powerful than what is in place today.
However, supercomputers and data centres require vast amounts of power – a problem that increasingly confronts the global information technology industry. Last week Google admitted its systems generate 0.2g of CO2 per search, even though each one lasts just 0.2 seconds.
“..weather forecast requires billions of calculations, something that would take weeks to do by hand”. Yeh, about 2000 weeks, at 1 second a calculation. On the other hand, slide rules have a low carbon footprint! And think about the employment prospects!
A bit more on my experience with comples models of earth science on big polluting computers.
It has been my experience that the bigger and more sophisticated the model, the easier it is to get the answer you want.
In a simple model. a little bias is easy to spot. In a big model, one can input reasonable, defendable values and parameters with just a small bit of bias. The cumulative affect is that in the end one has an extremely biased answer, but there is not one single, easy to indentify flaw in the input.
It is sort of a “Slightly rancid food in, putrid garbage out scenario”
This computer is perfect for that approach.
Michael,
Any comments on this story in Nature as reported in the Australian saying the Antarctic is melting after all and not getting colder?
Yes, it would be good to see a separate topic on this.
Abstract of the paper is here:
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v457/n7228/full/nature07669.html
and Professor Steig has discussed the paper at Real Climate here:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/01/state-of-antarctica-red-or-blue
The Met Office destroying the planet.
14,400 tons of CO2.
No mention of this on the BBC.
No no no no.
The BBC is there to inform and educate!
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7843186.stm
Is this the BBC i informing and educating?
BK
“We Had To Destroy The Planet In Order To Save It”
I wish I had one of those.
If the sea is releasing co2, mankind is burning oil and coal, the damn thing is going where? Increased biomass?
“” dales (11:22:25) :
I’m not sure what you wanted above for the website so left it blank. Anyway, I’ve been reading and following this site for several months. On my Reuters News site (get it as a part of a commodity info site), an article was posted today by one of their correspondents that was titled ” Antarctica is warming, not cooling – study shows”. The author was Eric Steig of the Univ of Washington in Seattle. I’m guessing you’ve already read. Just wanted your or other’s thoughts regarding it. “”
Well I read that Paper by Professor Eric Steig of WU. Strangely, although I am a paid up member of AAAS, I was not able to log in and download that “embargoed” paper, so I had to get it from somebody with a top secret clearance.
So I already e-mailed Prof Steig; and first I asked him, given that the West antarctic is warming at over 0.1 deg C per decade; when does he prdict it will reach the melting point and start the global flooding by raising the sea.
He replied that he doesn’t make such predictions; but that it would be “many many decades before melting started” My guessw as 3000 years.
So then I aksed him how deep down in the ice do the satellite measurements observe the temperature, and how deep in the ice does his 0.1 deg C per decade propagate. He replied that the satellites only measure the very surface temperature; that ice is a very good insulator so the rise doesn’t go very deep. He said that the major heat source of that 6000 feet of ice is warmth from the earth underneath.
In other words, a storm in a teacup. The Prof and his team used 25 years of satellite data, which can roughly cover the whole of Antarctica, and they used ground based but coastal weather station sites that date from OGY in 1957/58 to calibrate the satellite data, so they then extrapolated the coastal measured data over the whole continent.
East Antarctica is still cooling; so no problem there, but west is warming more than East is cooling, so net warm.
Please note that cooling is bounded by 0K or -273.15 C, while warming has no known upper limit.
Also note that EM radiation cooling from Antarctica goes as T^4, so a net increase overall, means that Antarctica increases its pitiful contribution to the cooling of planet earth.
So let’s hear it For a warming Antarctica.
By the Way Prof Steig was very polite, and forthright and sounds like an OK chap to me.
But it still sounds to me like a report that somebody found that a sheet of toilet tissue now absorbs water faster and will sink a little sooner.
George
This just goes to prove that you can have the best tools in your shop, but you are still a crappy mechanic doing low quality work. If you do not understand what you are working on all the fancy tools in the universe will not help you solve the problem.
My Father always said trust a man with used tools to fix your car, guys with all new tools usually just started to work with them….
The story in the Australian referred to earlier in this post is
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24946666-2702,00.html
symptomatic of the problem we have. Just read the last sentence!
Maybe we should dump CFCs into the atmosphere, or build a giant space cork.
Mr. Watt, this is getting out of hand!
Nothing less than obscene. Last year the UK science council axed the solar research program for less than half this amount.
Words fail me. For once.
I am not a meteorologist but I’ve always been a science buff and, since I’m English, I take a keen interest in the weather.
From my recollections of how they used to forecast in my youth, the met office would get reports of temperature, pressure, wind speed and direction, and humidity from all the land based stations and from ships at sea and then compile maps with all the useful information on them. (I used to love looking at these maps with their isobars and trying to work out what the weather was going to be.) They would then use a mixture of skill, judgement and memory, (hmm… the last time a map looked like this the weather was like that), to predict the weather for the next hours and days.
Then they got cloud radar and satellites and the predictions got better. Computers meant they could produce the maps quicker and, when they got super computers they could do the past comparisons quicker and eventually model weather on the basis of what paricular conditions had led to in the past. And the weather predictions got a bit better.
Then they got GCMs. GCMs can take the data from the weather stations and ships, and model (some of) the physical processes that cause weather to change and predict what’s going to happen. I’d really like to say that the forecasts improved, but I can’t.
I recall, a year or two ago, that the Met Office proudly anounced that they’d incorporated Global Warming algorithms into their weather forecast model and that this would improve their medium and longer term weather forecasting.
I’m sure that anyone who has been following their seasonal forecasts for the last few years will have noticed the improvement.
So now they’ve got a new supercomputer. Ok, my taxes have probably only paid for a keyboard or two, but until there is a change in attitude at the top, I expect the forecasts to be wronger, quicker.
(I’m sure Anthony will be able to correct my layman’s memory of meteorology in the latter half of the twentieth century, but that’s how I remember it.)
George E Smith,
East Antarctica is still cooling; so no problem there
You are misreporting Steig et al’s paper. Owing to uncertainty, East Antarctica may be cooling or it may be warming. You say that you’ve read their paper – may I suggest you read it again?
The fuel savings for the aviation industry come from predicting wind speed and direction and are as much a matter of data collection and collation as prediction. The airlines are not interested in lower carbon emissions. They want to save fuel. They pay for this data, and I would be interested to know if they feel they are getting their money’s worth, and whether their figures agree with the met office estimates.
(Further to my previous post, I still like to see the isobars, fronts, highs and lows on the weather maps on TV. I’m sure the modern graphics make it much easier for most people, but I like to do some of the work myself. It makes me feel more involved.
Oh, and congrats to Anthony and everyone on your award, and for all the work you put into making this the great site it is.)
Wouldn’t recording and analyzing simple observations be ultimately much cheaper and more accurate?
You know, like observing minus 20 temps and 3 feet of snow.
Alan Dickinson, Met Office Director of Science and Technology, said: “We recognise that running such massive computers consumes huge amounts of power and that our actions in weather and climate prediction, like all our actions, have an impact on the environment. We will be taking actions to minimise this impact.”
This means they’ll simply turn it off and fill in the missing information by hand.
How much plant life will benefit from an extra 14,400 metric tonnes of CO2.
How many trees would that support.
We could celebrate the METs efforts to green the planet.
edward (09:43:27) : “It’s clear CO2 PPM will scream right past 450 while the world will wonder how to keep warm as temperatures fall”
Don’t bank on it. Fred Lansner has shown that atmospheric CO2 levels are influenced by temperature (he used UAH LT), with a 3-9 month lag. His analysis suggests that CO2 levels will decrease if temperature anomaly falls below about -0.023. [name and all details from memory, apologies if I have got anything wrong].
Certainly it makes sense, and if he’s right and if the Earth is entering a significant cooling, then we may see CO2 levels drop without any assistance from Kyoto, ETSs etc.
Bet it is great to play Counter Strike Source on it or maybe DOD:S.
The electricity bill for computers has become a big cost factor at universities. A couple of Megawatt are constantly needed, especially for multi-processor clusters, and about the same amount is installed for cooling. I guess the IBM machine at Met office is another supercluster. Remove the local weather station from there.
Britain is planning to build of order 10 new Gigawatt nuclear power stations. Is Met office refusing to use nuclear power?
Antarctic warming: There is a website:
http://climexp.knmi.nl/selectfield_obs2.cgi?someone@somewhere
which Bob Tisdale pointed out to me.
There you can generate instant temperature plots for antartica. UAH looks like slight cooling, GISS however…
“Our existing supercomputer and its associated hardware produce 10,000 tonnes of CO2 each year…”
Strictly speaking, I doubt that hardware “produces” as much as a millifart of GHG.
The electricity it uses would be produced and used regardless.
Kevin B (15:17:04) :
“We estimate that for the European aviation industry alone our forecasts save emissions close to 3m tonnes by improving efficiency
The fuel savings for the aviation industry come from predicting wind speed and direction and are as much a matter of data collection and collation as prediction. The airlines are not interested in lower carbon emissions. They want to save fuel. They pay for this data, and I would be interested to know if they feel they are getting their money’s worth, and whether their figures agree with the met office estimates.”
Kevin,
So if I understand your post correctly MetOffice is selling weather forecasts to the aviation industry and at the same time they undermine their own customer base by promoting AGW hysteria?
They must have a real “Genius” running the place.
I would not trust their data even if I got paid for it.
Antarctic warming:
I forgot to mention:http://vortex.nsstc.uah.edu/data/msu/t2lt/uahncdc.lt
They give trends of -0.08 (total), -0.10 (land), -0.07 (ocean) for south pole,
means the land of antarctica has cooled by 0.3 centigrades in the last 30 years.
The Met O’s new computer will be programmed only by people who believe in AGW. That tells us all we need to know about what the results will confirm. But their fancy new computer is only a symptom of a much larger problem.
There is a reason for everything, and there is an ulterior motive behind the world-wide movement to falsely demonize “carbon” — a movement which will ultimately reduce everyone’s standard of living substantially [except in those countries that are rapidly accumulating national wealth, based on their ramping up of coal use and other types of carbon based power].
It is an indisputable fact that socialism [and of course communism] greatly reduces national wealth [East Germany/West Germany, North Korea/South Korea, etc.], and that capitalism greatly increases national wealth and the standard of living of everyone, rich and poor. So why do people want socialism, something that will only make them poorer? The reason is not, as you would expect, based on wealth. It is based on status.
Status explains the misguided drive toward inefficient power [windmills, hydrogen, etc.]; and the push to eliminate the most efficient power sources [coal, nuclear, etc.], along with the insane demand by the environmental movement to deconstruct major hydroelectric dams; and the baseless demonization of natural, necessary and beneficial carbon dioxide, based on the ‘environmentalists’ [repeatedly falsified] claim that increasing CO2 from 4 parts per ten thousand to 5 parts per ten thousand will cause runaway global warming.
This is an example of how social status works: when people are asked whether they would prefer to earn $100,000 a year when everyone else they know is earning $50,000 a year, or whether they would rather earn $150,000 a year when everyone they know is earning $300,000 a year, the answer is invariably that they would prefer to earn the lower amount — so long it is more than other people earn [source: the Economist].
Another example of status: during the Roman civil war, when Caesar’s army was marching in northern Italy, they came upon an extremely destitute, dirt-poor village. One of Caesar’s lieutenants jokingly asked Caesar how he’d like to be head man of that no-account village. Caesar answered, “Better head man here than second man in Rome.” Status is deeply ingrained. It goes back to Cain and Abel, and it trumps wealth.
Money is not the motivator for socialism; status is. The AGW scare is only a means to an end: the tearing down of wealthy societies in order to reduce the differences in status.
Lack of status explains why the more numerous poor voters [actually, today they are only less affluent] would rather narrow the income gap through wealth redistribution, and through the jacking up of energy prices — even when the result will hurt them more than it hurts others, and even though it means that the national wealth of their own country, and their own standard of living, will decline significantly.
Status also explains why so many already-wealthy citizens [billionaires, movie celebrities, CEO’s, etc.] love the idea of socialism: they already have theirs, and in a stagnant socialist economy it is much less likely that others will be able to rise up and become rivals for their status. Socialism always provides the wealthy with much higher social status than capitalism does, and it also gives them cover: the wealthy can always point out that socialism provides for everyone.
Within any country rich people are happier than poor people. But as a country becomes richer, its average happiness doesn’t increase [cite on request]. Even if it is much less likely that a ‘poor’ person will become rich under socialism, self-serving politicians constantly remind the less affluent that redistribution of wealth will narrow the gap between them and ‘the rich.’ The status gap narrows — but at a significant cost to national prosperity, and at a severe cost to the nation’s ethics, too:
Public servants who claim that small rises in an extremely minor trace gas will lead to climate catastrophe in short order must surely know better. That’s why they refuse to debate; their lies would be exposed. With the AGW/carbon scare, the country suffers both a reduction in its citizens’ living standards, and a loss of basic honesty. We can see the result right here: science is no longer trusted.
Voters are short sighted, and seldom think through to the end result: that a capitalist country will have much more discretionary wealth to provide medical services, transportation, low cost energy, cheap commodities, etc. Rabble rousing politicians throw gasoline on the flames of jealousy and envy by appealing to the difference in social status between the majority of voters and “the rich.”
It doesn’t matter that those who accumulate more wealth are those who tend to work harder and save more. By dragging down the most productive members of society, the status gap is narrowed, and that is what matters.
Social status was ingrained in human nature for millions of years, before any accumulation of wealth or money had ever begun. Most voters don’t consciously understand why they vote for socialism. They repeat all the phony reasons [“carbon,” “the poor,” “the environment,” etc.]. But they are not really voting for the money; rather they want to equalize status.
There is an old story of a Greek and a Turk. One of them [depending on who is telling it] is given one free wish by a jini. The catch is that whatever he wants, fame, fortune, etc., his enemy will get exactly double what he wishes for. His wish? “Put out one of my eyes.”
Society seems intent on figuratively putting out one of its eyes as a means of equalizing status. That is the basis of the irrational, emotional herd behavior of the AGW movement. The only ‘evidence’ for runaway global warming, with meters-high sea level rises, and disappearing glaciers, and melting sea ice, and so on, comes from always-inaccurate computer models — which have been programmed by the very same people who have an AGW agenda — and also from hearsay based on other hearsay based on other hearsay: “Coral bleaching!” [but of course the British court found coral bleaching to be completely unproven, along with many other AGW claims].
The real world refutes the alarmists time and again, but something as hard-wired in the human psyche as status is an enormous obstacle to overcome. We are well past the Age of Enlightenment. I certainly hope not, but the Dark Ages may be on the horizon. Everything goes in cycles.
Smokey:
RE: Ceasar story & status:
A more apt quote might be “It’s better to rule in Hell, than serve in Heaven.”
Maybe it will fail sometime during the windpower blackout.
Naa, don’t think so, they’ve probably got fiesel backup 🙁